Paul belived paradise was heaven

by DS211 60 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  DS211

  data dog--another thing. It thr NT only applies to the 144,000 then you have to assume the preaching work is also..matthew 28 i believe is the one saying the must preach and baptize...he was speaking to his apostles soooo....that would have to mean that the anointed 144,000 are the ones who preach and teach us to observe all the commandments...preaching work was not a "commandment". Jesus ditt say do the preaching wrk or else...
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  DATA-DOG

  Very true, but the WTBTS likes to apply things to whoever they want when it suits them. For instance, they will say that we are no longer under the Mosaic Law. So why do we have to have endless WT studies about the Temple arrangement that we are no longer under? So they can make us feel that we must practice a set of prescribed works, including giving our valuable things to the WTBTS, of course. They will tell you that if you are stumbled and leave the ORG, then you have left JEHOVAH (tm). How do they justify that? Well, Jesus went to the temple even though it was corrupt and the priest were bad, so WE should go to the KH.

  WE ARE NOT UNDER THE MOSAIC LAW ANYMORE!!!!!! I want to scream that sometimes.

  So you are right. When they want you to do something for the Organization, like give money or time, or die, then the Law applies and the NT applies to you. When they want to make you shut up, and they want to be the boss of you and keep a 2 Class system, then the NT does not apply to you.

  There was an article a couple months back that said the Great Crowd would no longer need Jesus as intercessor after the 1,000 year reign. Look up intercessor in the dictionary/thesaurus. See what another name for intercessor is.

  Trevor Scott,

  I agree 100%
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  transhuman68

  Comments from Leolaia on this thread:

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/169510/1/Is-Third-Heaven-a-Near-Death-Experience
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  SanLuisObispoTruthSeeker

  This week on the radio someone called in the Bible Answer man and another show "To every man a answer" Pastor Chuck and Pastor Jack. Here was there view of those heavens, everyone has their own right to different ideas, that is what makes this so robust!

  1. The First Heaven was considered where the bird's flew up and above in to the clouds and above the highest mountains.

  2. The Second Heaven "Stars and Planets", Constellations and the Sun.

  3. The Third Heaven was the Holy part where God lives, some traditions said there were many layers of heaven, some traditions exceed ten or greater than Paul's view of the "third heaven", different planes and layers in Heaven. Dante had his own comedy throughts of the layers of Hell.

  Pastor Chuck was on the radio from 3PM to 4PM, they take call in questions on their program "To every man that ask's, provide him a anwser".
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  designs

  Transdimensional
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  DATA-DOG

  ASGARD?! I wouldn't mind going there!
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  dog is god

  IMHO Paul is nothing less than the first giant hijacker of Jesus teachings. Jesus never taught what Paul taught. I pay no attention to his BS.
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  DS211

  Dog is god--is there more to this opinion that may warrant accuracy? id be inerested in readin such materials
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  fulltimestudent

  The word has Iranian origins:

  For convenience let's use Wikipedia (Can correct anything that can be demosntrated to be erroneous)

  Here's the etymology and semasiology of 'Paradise.'

  The word "paradise" entered English from the French paradis, inherited from the Latin paradisus, from Greek parádeisos(παρ?δεισος), and ultimately from an Old Iranian root, attested in Avestan as pairi.daêza-. [1] The literal meaning of this Eastern Old Iranian language word is "walled (enclosure)", [1] from pairi- "around" + -diz "to create (a wall)". [2] The word is not attested in other Old Iranian languages (these may however be hypothetically reconstructed, for example as Old Persian *paridayda-). By the 6th/5th century BCE, the Old Iranian word had been adopted as Akkadian pardesu and Elamite partetas, "domain". It subsequently came to indicate walled estates, especially the carefully tended royal parks and menageries. The term eventually appeared in Greek as parádeisos "park for animals" in the Anabasis of the early 4th century BCE Athenian gentleman-scholarXenophon. Aramaic pardaysa similarly reflects "royal park". Hebrew ???? (pardes) appears thrice in the Tanakh; in the Song of Solomon 4:13, Ecclesiastes 2:5 and Nehemiah 2:8. In those contexts it could be interpreted as an "orchard" or a "fruit garden". In the 3rd–1st centuries BCE Septuagint, Greek παρ?δεισος (parádeisos) was used to translate both Hebrew pardes and Hebrewgan, "garden": it is from this usage that the use of "paradise" to refer to the Garden of Eden derives. The same usage also appears in Arabic and in the Quran itself as ????? (firdaws). The idea of a walled enclosure was not preserved in most Iranian usage, and generally came to refer to a plantation or other cultivated area, not necessarily walled. For example, the Old Iranian word survives in New Persian paliz (or "jaliz"), which denotes a vegetable patch. However, the word park, as well as the similar complex of words that have the same indoeuropean root: garden, yard, girdle, orchard, court, etc., all refer simply to a deliberately enclosed area, but not necessarily an area enclosed by walls. For the connection between these ideas and that of the city, compare German Zaun ("fence"), English town and Dutch tuin ("garden"), or garden/yard with Nordic garðr and Slavic gard (both "city").

  In the religious soup that grew out of Persian thought mixed with Hellenic thinking after Alexander's conquest we find a few concepts in usage.

  Paradise is a religious or metaphysical term for a place in which existence is positive, harmonious and eternal. It is conceptually a counter-image of the supposed miseries of human civilization, and in paradise there is only peace,prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, but it is not necessarily a land of luxury and idleness. Paradise is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, in contrast to this world, or underworlds such as Hell. Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both. In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead. In Christian and Islamic understanding, Heaven is a paradisaical relief, evident for example in the Gospel of Luke whenJesus tells a penitent criminal crucified alongside him that they will be together in paradise. In old Egyptian beliefs, the otherworld is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell. For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity. The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss. In the ZoroastrianAvesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, incosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil. So for example, the Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace, and the perfect state that will be restored in the World to Come. The concept is a topos' in art and literature, particularly of the pre-Enlightenment era, a well-known representative of which is John Milton's Paradise Lost. A paradise should not be confused with a utopia, which is an alternative society.

  We have no way of knowing whether any Bible writer had a particular meaning in mind when he/she used the word, or whether they thought of 'paradise' in the same way as other writers.

  And, by the first century BCE, Mahayana Buddhism was also developing, with many concepts that could later be found in Christianity. Access to Buddhist thinking was easy. A great sea trade had developed between India and the Roman Empire (through the Red Sea Port of Berenice). Another route was the coastal route from the Persian gulf. It is impossible to think that the eastern Roman Empire ( in which Christianity developed) knew nothing about Buddhism, or that Buddhists were involved in that trade

  as an aside:

  Berenice was quite famous and prosperous in antiquity. The city is noted by most ancient geographers, including Strabo, Pliny the Elder (vi. 23, 26, 29, 33), and Stephanus of Byzantium (s. v.). Its prosperity after the third century was owing in great measure to three causes: the favour of the Macedonian kings, its safe anchorage, and its being a terminus of the great road fromCoptos, which rendered Berenice and Myos Hormos the two principal emporia of the trade between Aethiopia and Egypt on the one hand, and Syria and Tamilakkam on the other. The road across the desert from Coptos was 258 Roman miles long, or eleven days' journey. The road was provided with watering stations (Greek hydreumata, see Hadhramaut); the wells and halting places of the caravans are enumerated by Pliny (vi. 23. s. 26), and in the Itineraries (Antonin. p. 172, f.). Belzoni (Travels, vol. ii. p. 35) found traces of several of these stations. From the 1st century BC until the 2nd century AD Berenice was one of the trans-shipping points of trade between India, Arabia, and Upper Egypt. It was connected to Lower Egypt by the Via Hadriana in 137. The coastal trade from Berenice along the coast of the Indian Ocean is described in the anonymous 1st century AD handbookPeriplus of the Erythraean Sea. In the 4th century Berenice again become an active port,

  For example, there is a kind of Buddhist trinity, as illustrated:

  

  An early Buddhist triad. 2nd-3rd century CE. Gandhara. Musée Guimet . Personal photograph. From left to right, a Kushan devotee, the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the Buddha, the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, and a Buddhist monk. 2nd-3rd century, Gandhara chutiya

  Web reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BuddhistTriad.JPG

  And, the idea of a compassionate, self-sacrificing being, such as the Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara (in the above illustration, and below) is particularly interesting as a kind of proto-typical Jesus figure as he sacrifices his ascent to buddhahood in order to answer the cries of distress of humans and defers that ascent until every last sentient being has achieved their own Buddhahood (perfection?). In east Asia the Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara, transforms into a woman (such figures materialise to suit the need of the moment) and as Mao later said, women hold up half the sky. (grin) So in China Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara becomes Guan Yin and in Japan, Kannon. This figure is known for his/her compassion.

  

  This late Ming dynasty dry-lacquer sculpture is an image of the bodhisattva Guanyin, an enlightened being venerated in Chinese Buddhism as an embodiment of compassion. Called a "Water-moon Guanyin" or "Guanyin sitting in Royal Ease," this theme and its iconography derive from textual inspiration found in the Avatamsaka Sutra (the central text of the Hua-yen school of Buddhism), and indigenous Chinese traditions. The dry lacquer technique was popular, but examples of this size and degree of refinement are rare.

  And then there is the idea of a 'western paradise' where believers could go at death. As in Christianity, if at death, a believer called on the name Amitabha Buddha he would come for them and take them to his western Paradise.

  This is a later (Tibetan) representation of Amitabha's paradise:

  

  web-reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%27Amitabha_in_Sukhavati_Paradise%27,_Tibetan,_circa_1700,_San_Antonio_Museum_of_Art.jpg

  In Mahayana soteriology, Amitabha's pure land of Sukhavati (to use the Buddhist term) is described in the Longer Sukhavativyuha Sutra as a land of beauty that surpasses all other realms. It is filled with jewels, beautiful trees and flowers and healing trees and fruits.

  There is a remarkable similarity in descriptive terminology between the above Sutra and Revelation 21. A similarity that increase when you read Revelation 18 as a diatribe against east-west trade in goods and ideas. All the products that the writer mentions were bought and sold in the trading markets across Asia. Curiously the majority of Jews that had stayed behind in Babylon and became traders were a key part of that trade. These two sections of Revelation are worthy of further study from taht viewpoint.
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  yadda yadda 2

  "that he...heard unutterable words which it is not lawful for a man to speak."

  Why would they be unutterable and unlawful to speak if they were from God or Jesus?